No Ordinary Magic

Shortlisted, APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award

Laurie Swim is an artist of extraordinary range and vision. For more than forty years, she has been among the most capable and passionate practitioners of textile art.

In her chosen art form, Swim captures the essence of the seacoast. For the ocean, she works with silk, pulling stitches until they pucker to create gentle ripples. For vegetation and seaweed, she combines quilting, embroidery, painting, dyeing, and other seemingly opposing techniques.

As award-winning writer Carol Bruneau suggests in No Ordinary Magic, it’s not only Swim’s unconventional use of materials that is distinctive, it’s her gift for narrative that makes her art both resonant and endlessly intriguing. In this retrospective volume, Bruneau explores Swim’s history, her defiance of convention, and her reinvention of quilts as paintings-made-of-fabric. The result is a profound exploration of Swim’s sometimes monumental yet astonishingly intimate work.